I wrote a
while ago about the problem I saw with large Packages and Sources
files, and AJ jumped
on what I'd written. I've been away for a while since and not had a
chance to respond. Basically, I don't have a problem with what AJ's
suggesting - I hadn't seen the pdiff idea before so thanks for the
pointer. I prefer the timestamped and sorted Packages file personally
(compared to a potentially large number of extra diff files on the
mirror), but I don't have a great attachment to the idea - there's
more than one way to do this and so long as something is done
then I'll be happy.

One thing that's not clear from AJ's description of pdiffs is how a
client should work out which diffs it needs. Timestamps could be
unreliable unless the client and ftpmaster agree on times. But Daniel
mentioned earlier that simply MD5ing the client's existing Packages
file and having it ask for diff.<MD5> from the server should do
the job. Fine, I see how that works.

So, next thing to do is have a look at the archive scripts to
make this work...

Debian-cd is probably like a lot of the infrastructure packages
that we use, in that the packaged versions are generally out of date
and therefore not very useful for Debian developers. But we should
still package them, as that way our users get neatly-packaged stuff
easily available instead of having to fight cvs/svn to download
them.

debian-cd 2.2.18 should contain all the various local patches and
tweaks that most of us have been using over the CVS version for the
last few months, and I'm about to upload it with urgency=medium so it
will make the sarge release. It shouldn't cause any issues for the
build daemons, as it's binary-all anyway.

Once sarge is released, I want to get stuck in and make some large
changes to the way debian-cd works. Obviously, the first of these will
be to use JTE
(which is too big a change to go in so close to a release
IMHO). Secondly, I'd like to refactor and clean up the code to a large
extent. Unlike some people, I don't think that debian-cd is
particularly in need of replacement - it just needs some cleaning
up. The steps required to build debian CDs are always going to be long
and complex (and generally messy), and pretending otherwise
doesn't help.

I have some basic ideas on how I want to do things, but nothing
really worthy of comment just yet. Watch this space!

I've fixed a couple of bugs found by Manty when not creating
template files, updated the mkisofs man page and added docs about the
new $ARCH-boot support. I've also added a patch against debian-cd HEAD
- use this OR the jte_support branch in CVS if you want to use JTE to
create debian jigdos.

I was hoping Joerg would take at least the boot patches into the
upstream cdrtools package, but his licensing flamewar means it will
probably not happen now. I'll have to talk to the various distro
maintainers about taking them instead.

NOTE: the JTE patch to mkisofs needs to be applied AFTER debian
patches have been applied during the package build process, as that's
easiest for people who want to use the rest of the Debian-applied
patches too.